Becoming Austrian: A Triptych

I know very little about my grandfather except that re-becoming Austrian killed him. On the 12th of May 1975, five days after Austrian officials granted him the citizenship that had been revoked by Austrian officials 37 years prior, he had a major heart attack. Aged 68 and a prolific smoker, it would be fair to say his sputtering heart owed its demise to a mesh of strained health and general senescence. But that line of reasoning does not a story make. Or, at least, not a good story. So, the story goes that the stress and trauma of reclaiming his Austrian citizenship killed him.

The subtext is, of course, that he may have survived the Holocaust, but Hitler got him in the end. Although it had been decades since the Axis states were ground into contrition and the world first sang out Never Again, trauma cares little for time. It seeps into DNA, reconstitutes the body and psyche from inside out, repaints an innocent world around you as something more sinister. You only have to be reminded of the past to be back in the past. And if this happens enough, one day, it may well kill you. 

By comparison, when I got my Austrian citizenship in August 2022, it was a straightforward, undramatic affair. I showed up to the embassy with a slim binder of documents. I chatted to the consular officer about his hometown of Bregenz (he was surprised I knew it) and my hometown of Oxford (he had visited it recently). He said everything looked good. The shoulders of my ancestors—knotted by history, bowed by reams of documents asserting their humanity, very nearly vaporised eight decades ago—had been slimmed down to a narrow sheath, a pleasant chat, and the assurance that provided everything checked out I could expect to receive my Austrian-ness by post in one to four months. 

My father, the Historian, was the middle man. Nobody in my family had given much thought to staking their claim to Austrian citizenship until 2016, when the UK voted to leave the EU. It took a couple of years of weighing up options and getting the papers in order, but in early 2019, he decided to give it a shot. Austria told him no, he had no right to citizenship. A few months later, he got a phone call. We’ve changed our minds and our laws, Austria told him, file your papers right and citizenship is yours. My father, with his binders and binders of family history, was plagued by anxiety. The spectre of his father’s fate loomed over him. He was 66! Not so far from 68, would the death knell ring for him, too?

But he did more than survive: he was reborn. Austria handed him a piece of paper that said he had, in fact, been Austrian since birth. (It’s no secret that Austrian bureaucracy works in mysterious ways, that neither of his parents had Austrian citizenship in 1953 when he was born in London, a British citizen, seemed not to matter).

This was the piece of paper that smoothed out my own path. None of the documents in the binder I took to the Austrian embassy conveyed my grandparent’s history. The process had been streamlined: because my grandfather had re-become Austrian, this meant my father was born Austrian, which meant, as the child of an Austrian, I, too, could become Austrian.